Street Rich

I was recently helping one of my friends clean out her grandmother's house after she died. I am unemployed, and cannot get enough of the smells of cabbage, bleach, and mothballs, so this was right up my alley. Plus I figured my friend would appreciate someone being there with her, especially when she got to her grandmother's undergarments. No one wants to handle their own grandmother's undergarments. Not that I was exactly looking forward to that part, but I digress.

My friend never knew this, but her grandmother was a hoarder. You know what I mean, some people never throw away a newspaper, other's it's clothes, other people it's pets, etc. For my friend's grandmother, it was a different collection for each room.

In the spare room, her grandfather's old study, it was Elvis and Clowns. EVERYWHERE. I wasn't afraid of clowns before, but I am NOW. She even had an Elvis Clown, which I am pretty sure my friend is busily looking up on Ebay to see how much it is worth, because neither of us had seen such an abortion of a figurine in our entire lives. And therefore it must be worth money.

In every purse we found sugar packets and cookies that date back to 1979. This woman had close to 50 purses too. One of which I was allowed to take home, because my friend thought it was a dead animal. Like you could resist a purple and green shag purse? Don't act like you could.

And then there were the hair clips. My friends grandmother had something close to 500 hair clips. My friend was like "I have never, in 30 years of my life, ever seen this woman wear a hair clip. Not in pictures. NOTHING. NEVER!"

But nothing - NOTHING I TELL YOU - prepared us for the drugs. The woman had a bathtub full of pills. Not that we found them in the tub, we just used to tub to store them as we found them. They were stored by pill type in those large freezer-sized ziplock bags. She had antidepressants, she had MORPHINE, she had percocet, she had vicodin, she had pills I HAVE NEVER HEARD OF, she had unmarked pills that we were afraid to touch. There was everything from synthetic estrogen to birth control pills to what I am pretty sure is ecstasy (do any other pills have happy faces on them? NONE THAT I AM AWARE OF.)

We spent half the day googling different pill types. And being more and more horrified.

My friend and I were surveying the bathtub o' pharmaceuticals, and my friend started laughing. I asked her what was up, and her response was priceless:

"Dude, we are totally street rich! How much do you know about the black market?"

She was kidding of course, but still, what do you do with all those pills? I considered flushing them, but then I remembered all the drugs that are in the water and how that is not a good thing, plus the toilet was from 1920...

So, we did what normal women do when they do not know what to do:

We called her mother.

Her mother called a cop-friend of his, and then the police showed up and hauled off our monty pile of street riches. We had to give our names, and the police officer was checking in the pills and asking us "any idea what these are? No? Me neither."

So now my name is associated with what can only be described as the largest "drug bust" in that suburb's history. We weren't arrested or anything, it was just the oddest thing ever.

PS The cop was TOTALLY weirded out by the clown room. He was like "Oh! Uhhhh how about we just close this door then?"